A very short but useful tip this week. If you need to quickly resize a Window, remember that double-clicking the Titlebar of any Window (the horizontal part of a window across the top where the name of the document and applications usually appears) will toggle it between full screen size (the same as Maximize) and its former size (the same as Restore). If you want to resize a window the Titlebar is a bigger target than the caption buttons. Unfortunately this trick doesn’t work on a Mac.…

You should be very comfortable with the basics of navigating PowerPoint when you are doing a presentation. It looks rather unprofessional when someone gets up in front of an audience and has difficulties in the middle of their presentation. Here are some helpful PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts that will help you navigate through your presentation.

One of the most helpful keyboard shortcuts is using the Space Bar to advance to the next slide. Of course, you can use Page Down, however the Space Bar is a much larger target and it’s easier to hit that if you are nervous or your …

Many installations of Microsoft Office have “Full menus” disabled. What does this mean? You only see limited menu choices (i.e., the ones you have used before and recently) when you click on File, Edit, View, Insert, etc.

When Full Menus is off you can’t see menu commands that you don’t use often or have never used before unless you click the two downwards pointing chevrons at the bottom of the menu – this forces Windows to show all the available commands on that menu. You can also double-click the menu to expand it.

When you expand one menu, all of …

Few things are more finicky than typing case citations in various legal documents. Most people use toolbar buttons to turn italics and underling on and off. Reach for mouse, reach back, reach for mouse again, reach back… There is a better and must faster way.

With these three simple keyboard shortcuts case typing case citations will be a breeze:

• Press Ctrl+I to turn italics on/off
• Press Ctrl+U to turn underline on/off
• Press Ctrl+B to turn bold on/off

A side note for those that are not familiar with the syntax for describing keyboard shortcuts. Simply remember that a plus sign (+) …

It is amazing how Google can search the web and find exactly what you are looking for. However, as amazing as Google is, you can do a few things to help it better find the information you are searching for – read on.

These things will help Google find the specific information you are searching for:

• Use multiple search terms: Narrow your results with more search terms as Google will return only pages that include all of your search terms.
• Make your search terms as specific as possible to the information you are looking for.
• Remember Google uses stemming technology

The Google Alerts service is one of many very helpful Google apps. It allows you to monitor the web for interesting new content and it will send you an email update of the relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• Being aware of your name or your firm name appearing in the new or on the web
• Monitoring a developing news story
• Keeping current on a competitor or industry
• Getting the latest on a celebrity or event
• Keeping tabs on your favourite sports teams

To create …

An email exchange is not the same as a phone call or a face-to-face conversation. At the top of the hierarchy of human communications are face-to-face meetings, then phone calls, then voice mail, and lastly email. Face-to-face meetings have the most impact. Not only can you hear and talk back to the other person, you also have the ability to see gestures and facial expressions etc. On the phone you don’t see gestures, but you can hear the tone and emotion in the speaker’s voice. Email has the narrowest communications bandwidth – it is only black and white words on …

Switching between open programs is one of the most frequent things we all do as we work on our computers. For this task most of us use a mouse to select a button on the task bar. There is a much faster way.

Pressing Alt+Tab (or on a Mac Option+Tab) will open a rectangular grey pop-up window in the centre of your screen. It will have an icon for each program that is running on your computer.

Press and hold down the Alt key, and then repeatedly press Tab to jump from one icon to the next in this pop-up …

Google Translate is a free translation service that provides instant translations between 57 different languages. It can translate words, sentences, web pages and even whole documents (in a PDF, TXT, DOC, PPT, XLS or RTF format) between any combination of the 57 supported languages (See a list here).

Like most Google tools, it is extremely easy to use. Google Translate generates the translation by looking at the patterns in hundreds of millions of previously translated documents. Do you get perfect and sworn to be accurate translations you that you can take to court? No – but they are …

Adding some clipart, animations or photos is one of the best ways to make a presentation, newsletter or website look more professional. There are thousands of sites on the Internet that offer free and pay clip art.  While there is good content on some of these sites, many force you to deal with large amounts of advertising and many pop-ups.  Don’t bother with them.

The best source of free online clip art photos, animations and sounds, bar none, is the .  It has thousands of free images and media files, which you can very easily search by keywords and categories. …